Communication networks provide communication services which are an important tool in allowing emergency or disaster responders to respond to emergency situations. Emergency responders can include police, firefighters, paramedics, etc. Communication networks can also be used by investigators during investigations of the cause of the emergency situation. Mission critical communication scenarios are discussed in a technical report of the 3GPP, titled TR 22.879 V1.0.0 (published in September 2015, which is hereby incorporated by reference in its entirety.
In emergency scenarios, network availability and/or reliability may be affected by the emergency situation, possibly disrupting normal communications, especially if part of the infrastructure is damaged or otherwise not available. Similarly, emergency communications place greater demands on the communication network infrastructure, potentially exceeding available network capacity. However, emergency responders at the scene and personnel at emergency control centers can greatly benefit from mission critical (MC) data being transmitted, received and stored, either during the emergency or for subsequent investigations.
For example, in prior art networks a data rate for a particular communication session may be set to a lowest rate by the slowest resource in the session. For instance, a limited resource may only be able to process audio or video at a low data rate causing the entire communication session to proceed at that low data rate.
While this solution allows the session to be operable, potentially useful information may be lost as a result of restricting communications to the most limited resource in the session.
Accordingly, there is a need for improved networking services for providing mission critical communication services for critical communications, especially in the case of an emergency.
This background information is provided to reveal information believed by the applicant to be of possible relevance to the present invention. No admission is necessarily intended, nor should be construed, that any of the preceding information constitutes prior art against the present invention.